One of the aspects of innovation is gathering and storing knowledge from different employees and stimulating teamwork. More and more, the meetings involved with these activities need to be performed from different geological locations. Web meeting software offers a good solution to organize these place-independent meetings.
Last week I stumbled across Dimdim, an open source company that offers free web meeting software. With their service you can share your desktop, share slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam all in your browser. No application instalation is needed (Software as a Service or SaaS), just like with the service of their competitor Webex. However, the fact that it is free gives it a big advantage over services like Webex. Within two weeks they will also support desktop sharing for Mac, so we’ll have to wait for the next release to do a full test. It does look promising though.
There’s need for diffentiation: There’s a basical edition for free. The more features you want, the more you have to pay. Well, however, dimdim will challenge webex in fields of videokommunikation. Lots of people have joined already. Unneglectable in this case is security of data placed/saved and data transfered through the lines (coding).
Sandra
MVC
http://www.mvc.de/
October 9th, 2008 by MVC Unified Communications
Hi Sandra,
Thanks for your response. I think that next to security two more aspects are very important: lagtime and the quality of the connection. With some of the webmeeting programs the lagtime is so large that you cannot have a decent presentation or demo. Whereas a constantly failing connection does not help your demo either. So a number of aspects need to be considered when choosing the most suited webmeeting software for your needs.
Jurjan
October 14th, 2008 by Jurjan Huisman